


:_______)  and the angry inches

by remaya



Category: Original Work
Genre: Author Is Sleep Deprived, Crack, Gen, Humor, Hurt No Comfort, Kinda Facial Disfigurement, Light Angst, Morally Ambiguous Character, No Smut, Non-Graphic Violence, Tragedy, no real neighbors were harmed in the making of this fic, warning for brief non-explicit neighbor eating
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-09-10
Updated: 2020-09-10
Packaged: 2021-03-06 19:47:37
Rating: Mature
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,710
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26394391
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/remaya/pseuds/remaya
Summary: Our anti-hero,:_______)appears here with a repertoire of Oscar-worthy expressions….
Comments: 21
Kudos: 6





	:_______)  and the angry inches

**Author's Note:**

  * For [nightmeadow](https://archiveofourown.org/users/nightmeadow/gifts).



> WARNING for brief, non explicit, implied, villainous neighbor eating.
> 
> yes, the title is adapted from "Hedwig and the Angry Inch." hahahahaha i love that movie

Here is the anti-hero of this work of fiction:

: )

Ever since he was little he knew he was destined to be a villain. He was shunned by his peers because his face was too long, creepily long. The distance between his eyes and his mouth was this vast expanse of nothingness. His eyebrows were practically nonexistent. And worst of all, his head was sideways, and no matter how much he tried his best-- no matter how many experimental treatments he tried at the doctor’s-- no matter how many neck-strengthening exercises he found on the internet-- he could not straighten his head.

He grew frustrated and angry. He couldn’t understand why he was the only one to suffer such misfortune. Most of the time, he looked like this:

: (

By the time he entered middle school, he was the pariah of the small town of Smileyville. He wore all black and pulled a beanie over his forehead to hide his lack of eyebrows. He unironically chose “Bring Me to Life” by Evanescence and “Pumped Up Kicks” by Foster the People as his theme songs and listened to them with religious fervor every day. He skipped class to hang out by the dumpster, but no one would get close enough to him to sell him anything good, so he was hanging out by the dumpster doing absolutely nothing. Nothing. 

He thought it couldn’t get any worse. But, since this is a tragic origin story, it did.

On his fourteenth birthday he woke up to his poor mother’s gasp of horror.

“: (!” she cried. “What-- what happened to your face?”

“You birthed it,” : ( replied, sullenly, as soon as he gathered his wits. He was at that young stage of life where he blamed his parents for everything.

“No,” his mother wailed, and she ran out of the room.

: ( shrugged. His mother had a breakdown every other week. It might have had to do with her crumbling marriage to an absent husband, or maybe with her guilt for failing her duty as a mother to love her child for all he was.

: ( was thinking about what he would sulk about at the dumpster that day while he went about his morning ablutions. However, when he went to brush his teeth, he noticed something strange in the mirror.

B :

It was… _reverse buck teeth_.

He stared at the horrendous protrusions. He tried to prod them back into his mouth with his fingers. He thought about filing them down, but he didn’t like pain. He ended up brushing his teeth; but he had to use two dollops of toothpaste instead of just one, because the reverse buck teeth were so large.

Misfortune comes in threes. Therefore, that day at the dumpster, our anti-hero found two more of them… only, in his youthful delusion, he mistook them for blessings.

The first, he found in the dumpster. A splash of yellow had caught his eye while he was reminiscing about his Before-Buckteeth-Days, bopping along to “Bring Me to Life.” He weighed the promise of treasure against getting trash all over himself.

He jumped into the dumpster and fished out a lemon.

Something about the lemon was compelling. He couldn’t look away from it. Eventually he gave in, cut it in two with the switchblade he had kept on his person for two years (the switchblade being used for the first time), and put one half of the lemon in his mouth. A tangy, sour flavor exploded over his palate. His expression looked like this:

: {

This was a magic lemon. As : { sucked on it, he noticed something strange. With a _pop,_ his reverse buck teeth floated free of his bottom gums. 

Hopeful, he sucked more vigorously on the lemon. Sadly this only seemed to encourage his top front teeth to also detach. Frightened at this point, : { could only continue to suck, both literally and in attitude. Through some sort of magical process his reverse buck teeth and his top front teeth switched places and reattached themselves to his gums.

He spit out the lemon half, tossing it into the dumpster, and hunted around the empty parking lot for a puddle in which to see his reflection. He looked like this:

: B

: B’s reverse buck teeth were now reversed into normal buck teeth. Seeing as the first lemon half had yielded such a positive result, : B promptly shoved the second lemon half into his mouth and sucked vigorously. The same strange feeling washed over him; however, it didn’t have the same effect, since none of his teeth popped out of his gums. He spit out the lemon half as soon as the tingling stopped and rushed over to the puddle.

E :

It was a buck teeth upgrade! E : was pleased. With the shaped of these new buck teeth, his face didn’t seem as abnormally long anymore-- kind of how his mom liked to wear her slinky black evening dress on her rare dates with her husband, because she’d say black made her look slim.

The tragedy in this backstory is that E : didn’t realize how much more Smileyville shunned him for this development. He embraced the very quality that Smileyville feared the most. Ironic, isn’t it… 

Regardless of how Smileyville feared him, E : made it to adulthood with minimal incident. As soon as he was able, he moved out of town with his mother’s relieved blessing. He worked hard despite the normal smileys giving him looks like

D :

(sideways, as he sees them because he is sideways). He secured a prestigious university degree, which he used to land a high-paying work-from-home job. And then, with his education and income secured, he sat down at his knockoff Parnian desk and thought about the type of villain he wanted to become. 

Firstly, the buck teeth had to go. He had gotten used to them, even perhaps grown fond of them, but they were _too_ distinct. He already had his long face as a defining feature-- no need to increase that risk, as his desire was to get away with crimes, not to be known for them. So he booked an appointment with a liberally-minded dentist and got his buck teeth filed down. He looked in the mirror afterwards and smiled:

: D

Secondly, he needed eyebrows. He was under the strong impression that a respectable villain possessed commandeering eyebrows representative of their power. So he commissioned the thickest and most domineering eyebrows his morally dubious surgeon would give him. The surgeon, after some bribery, gave him a satisfactory caterpillar brow:

| : D

He was ready to commit crimes!

>: P

Even when he looked in the mirror the next morning and discovered overnight acne

D . : >

his villainous mood could not be dampened! 

He practiced his evil smirk a few times

L . :<

and set off to wreak havoc on the unsuspecting world!

* * *

With a tragic origin story like this, it is natural and correct to assume that our anti-hero, 

| : )

made a bit of a name for himself over the years, despite his initial hesitance to. His reputation didn’t turn out to be a problem, though, because he discovered in himself a skill for easily avoiding law enforcement.

Less easily avoided were the worshipers that he never asked for. How he felt about them was sometimes this

>: }

but mostly this:

J : >

Here’s an example: the one that summoned him for a favor when he was in the middle of eating dinner.

“I’ve sacrificed hundreds of lemons to you,” the sycophant told him. “I’m your humble and most devoted servant. I make shrines to you in dumpsters, I set caterpillars free instead of killing them when I find them in my house, I got this buck teeth surgery to honor your origins--”

“What do you want?” >: | interrupted, wishing he was back at his dinner table.

“Well, you see,” the sycophant said, “I’ve been concerned, lately, that when it’s late at night and my lights are on and my blinds aren’t drawn, my neighbors are looking in through my windows to see what I’m doing.”

>: { was tired of this conversation. “So draw your blinds, then.”

“But what if I forget?” The sycophant sat heavily on their couch and draped the back of their hand over their eyes in a dramatic fashion. “I can’t live in a perpetual state of fear! I just can’t!”

“The only solution is to turn the lights off and go to sleep,” >: L advised.

“But alas!” the sycophant wails. “I have found another solution!” And they give a horrendous, sideways buck toothed smile: 

(EI :\

and add, “It gives you a better dinner than the broccoli you were eating!”

“How did you know I was eating broccoli?” D : > asked.

“Oh, I follow you religiously,” the sycophant says. “Will you help me with my neighbors?”

| : | considered.

“Alright,” he agreed at last. 

So he went to the neighbors’ houses, and during the night he happily chewed on his favorite food.

T : >

In the morning the sycophant found their neighborhood neighbor-free. There weren’t even bodies to clean up! | : D had been very thorough.

* * *

| : D admitted that fame wasn’t all bad. Since his worshipers regularly sent him large sums of cash, he was able to replace his knockoff Parnian desk with an actual one. And the lemons they sacrificed to him helped him grow stronger.

There was one downside to his lemon consumption, however. It seemed that with every thousandth lemon he sucked on, the vast expanse of nothingness between his eyes and his mouth…

< : |

well, it expanded.

And eventually

< : (

his face became so long that it negatively impacted his quality of life.

He had to go to Salar de Uyuni, a salt flat in Bolivia that’s the flattest place on earth, just to turn his face around so he could make a different expression.

D :<

Eventually his face became so long that it was separated by line breaks.

D

  
  
  
  


:<

The real tragedy of this story is that our anti-hero didn’t visit his surgeon before his face was so long that he couldn’t anymore. His face is forever elongating. He is stuck in a perpetual limbo, wrapped several times around the earth, only able to eat the occasional lemon a worshipper tosses into his horrified mouth.

Is there a point to this story?

No.

**Author's Note:**

> notes: not to be taken seriously. any resemblance to real life people, places, events, and things is coincidental, except for some quotes lifted directly off of my DMs with nightmeadow.


End file.
